Thursday, August 19, 2010

Social Media is all about interaction. It is good and healthy engagement with your community members. Your community members could be called by any name for instance Fan on Facebook, Followers on Twitter and so on. Whatever we may term them they are fellow members having a similar thought and they contribute ideas and thought processes towards the same main conversational point.

The situation: Social Media is a 24 by 7 [24/7] task. There could be comment or a post concerning you or your brand anytime and anywhere within the online space. You are not really expected to answer this intermediately however it would be just great and a bonus point for you if you do answer it immediately. Having said this you are not to reply to it 'never' or after a 'couple of days' this definitely will be negative for you. Ofcourse there could be instances which you may select not to interact upon based on how you may want to portray your brand.

If this is the situation what should you do? should you really be online 24hours all of the 365 days? This ofcourse is humanly not feasible. Hence we have a range of tools that come to us within the online space. Some of them are free and some come at a cost. They enable us to 'gather' our name [brand] being mentioned anywhere and hence we could be able to answer and communicate to fellow commentators.

While tracking of Twitter is not too difficult though. The reason being that we have number of good and useful tools online. However a huge membership of Facebook does not have easily identifiable tools online. The reason being that Facebook does not enable tracking by outsiders easily.

So how do you track your Facebook members and how do you track your Facebook Fan Pages? Facebook already has a good 'Insights Dashboard' where you get to see the number of interactions done. You can view the number of users, comments etc. Do you use this? What other tools do you use? Do join in here and lets share ideas on which online free tools you use for Facebook.